The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 4

THE INSIDE OF the Cadillac smelled like a tub full of lilac petals—Rhonda distilled.

Pax rode in the back alone, while Rhonda sat up front in the passenger seat next to Everett. “My next project is to build our own high school,” Rhonda said. Only the top of her hair-sprayed head was visible. “You know they wouldn’t let Everett play on the football team at the county school? Can’t pass the physical, they said, because he’s morbidly obese. Obese! Not for a charlie, I said. Not for one of our people. They won’t let the argo boys play either, especially not basketball. Lord, they’re deathly afraid of argos playing basketball. Not that they’re any good at it—they got hands like concrete. And nobody wants to even shower with the beta boys. Tell me that’s not discrimination.”

“That’s discrimination,” Pax said.

“You bet it is. We’re going to sue their hind ends off, then use it to pay for the stadium. Everett here can be our coach.” Pax could see the side of his face. The man shook his head, smiling shyly. It was the first time Pax had seen him break his frown.

They skirted the edge of town, taking Roberts Road under the eastern face of Mount Clyburn. The fields of the Whitmer farm opened up to their right, and a new white fence sprang up and raced alongside the road, pickets blurring. As they approached the entrance to the farm, he saw that they’d turned the place into a trailer park. Fourteen or fifteen mobile homes surrounded what looked like a white-painted warehouse, a cheap sheet-metal building with a low, flat roof. The Whitmers’ ancient barn still stood in the distance, but the old farmhouse was gone. Beta children played between the trailers, and a few of the taller girls wore those white scarves on their heads.

Aunt Rhonda rolled down the window and waved at two beta women inside the fence who were unloading bags of insulation from the bed of a pickup. They wore nothing on their smooth heads, and one of them carried a toddler in a pack on her back. The women returned the wave without smiling, but maybe that was a beta thing.

“Those blanks are breeding like rabbits,” Rhonda said, and rolled up the window.

Blanks. Another slang term. Every clade had to be put in their place, he thought. “Was that the Co-op?” he said.

“Jo Lynn started that after you left,” Rhonda said. “Not her best idea.”

“Jo did? But she was living on her own,” Pax said.

“Just the past couple years, hon. She started the farm back in, oh, a year after you left, I guess. Several families moved in with her. She tried to call it a commune at first, but people didn’t like the sound of that. Anyway, more and more of them started moving out there. There’s quite a few blanks still living around town in their old houses, trying to keep their old families together. But I think deep down the betas like living close, sharing the babies.”

“But Jo, did she leave, or was she kicked out?”

Rhonda laughed. “A little of both.”

“How so?”

“Jo was all for planned motherhood. That didn’t sit too well with the younger girls. Every single one of them wants to be the Virgin Mary, even if they’re fourteen. Especially if they’re fourteen. And then when Jo—well, I don’t need to talk about that.”

“About what?”

“Oh, there’s all kinds of rumors. Nobody needs to tell you how people talk.”

Pax sat back, his face burning as if he’d been slapped. Nobody forgets anything in your hometown, he thought. Ten years wasn’t enough. Twenty. He’d die an old man and they’d still say, You heard why his daddy ran him out of town, didn’t you?

Rhonda leaned over and looked between the seats at him, raising her eyebrows. “Paxton, you’re a grown man now. You know how small-minded people can be. Jo Lynn never was shy about sharing her opinion, and what’s more, she was ready to do more than just talk about it—she was going to take action. A lot of the sisters, especially the young ones—well, they thought she was the devil herself.”

Roberts Road ended at the highway, and Everett turned the car south, away from town. A half mile after the south gate, one of the boundaries during the quarantine, he turned off onto a newly paved road that wound up into the hills. When Pax was a kid there’d been nothing out here but trees and scrub brush.

Near the top of the hill the driveway was blocked by a black iron gate set into a high stone wall. Everett stopped and spoke into an intercom set on a post a few feet from the gate. “Aunt Rhonda’s here,” the chub boy said.

“What’s with the high security, Aunt Rhonda?” Pax said. His tone was light, but the fortress set dressing had put him on edge.

“Can’t be too careful, hon,” Rhonda said.

The gate swung open. Everett drove up the hill and around a curve, where the drive ended in front of a one-story brick building like an elementary school. White cement columns supported a broad porch and entranceway. The bottoms of the columns were smudged with red clay, but otherwise the place looked almost brand-new.

They got out of the car, and Everett retrieved the Styrofoam cooler from the Cadillac’s trunk. Pax knew there’d come a point when he’d have to ask Aunt Rhonda what she was going to do with those vials—and then all this polite chitchat would be over.

A charlie man in a brown security uniform came out of the building to meet them. He was in his forties, looking more fat than muscular. His hairline had retreated to high ground. “How you doing today, Aunt Rhonda?” he said.

“Just fine, Barron. This is Paxton Martin, the Reverend Martin’s boy.”

They shook hands and Barron said, “Welcome to the Home.”

The guard led them up the ramps to the building and opened the door for them. The foyer was tiled in pale green slate, the air glowing with sunlight pouring through a row of high windows. A man older and more immense than Pax’s father napped on a huge, sturdy couch.

“We have thirteen men living here now,” Rhonda said. “We take care of them because their families just can’t. You’ve seen how hard it is. Come on, I’ll show you around the place.”

Rhonda led Pax toward a set of double doors. Barron started to follow, but at a look from Rhonda he stopped at the edge of the lobby. Everett had already disappeared in the other direction, carrying the cooler.

Rhonda pressed a button on the wall, and the doors glided open to reveal a small space before another set of doors. She gestured Pax inside, and when the doors closed behind him, a vent in the ceiling jetted warm air at them. Five seconds later the next set of doors swung open. Pax thought, Air lock?

The area beyond was a hallway and a row of serious-looking doors. She opened the first of them and showed him an empty apartment: bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, and kitchenette, all laid out wide for charlie bodies. The tubs and toilets were enormous.

“You certainly seem to be well equipped,” Pax said. “I suppose that was you who set my father up with that big new toilet?”

“Hon, fixing up that bathroom was the least we could do. He didn’t want to come live here at the Home, but there are certain needs for people our size. Our old houses just aren’t built for our new bodies.” She laughed and patted one of her big hips.

She took him to the next apartment. A man sat propped up in a queen-sized hospital bed, watching a game show on a huge flat-screen TV. The room seemed to be at least partly furnished with his own belongings: homemade quilts, lamps that didn’t match, picture frames and knickknacks on the shelves. The man watched the screen intently, his mouth moving as if he was chewing on the inside of his cheek. His exposed skin was splotched with a white substance like dried sunblock.

“How you doing today, Elwyn?” Aunt Rhonda said, raising her voice over the sound of the TV. Elwyn’s jaw hung slack for a moment, and then he resumed his chewing. He never looked away from the screen.

“Every room has a big-screen TV and five hundred satellite channels,” Rhonda said. “Our boys like the TV.”

She showed him two more rooms. Both occupants were about the age of Pax’s father, and they looked much more alert than Elwyn. The men made small talk, and seemed happy enough to see Rhonda. Both were patched by white ointment—jalopies primed for a new paint job.

Rhonda said, “We’ve got three women who do all the cooking down at a kitchen I set up downtown, and we bring it in fresh every day. Nothing fancy—most of our men like their food home-style. We go through five pans of cornbread every meal.” She glanced up at Pax. “So how’s your father eating these days?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s kind of, uh, hit-and-miss.”

She nodded understandingly. She was trying to score points, and she knew that he knew it.

“Who’s paying for all this?” he asked.

“The whole clade,” Rhonda said. “Every charlie pitches in.”

“Really?”

“Oh, sometimes family members donate, the skips or people from other clades whose daddy starts producing. But mostly it comes from our own people. That’s because we all know that we have to take care of our own. The blanks won’t help; the argos won’t help. And we aren’t getting a thing from the government.” She patted Paxton to point him back toward the double doors. She kept touching him, Pax noticed, but hadn’t touched any of the residents. In fact, she hadn’t gotten within five feet of them.

“Deke told me my father was dry,” Pax said.

“Not completely,” Rhonda said. “We checked on him every so often, but he wasn’t producing more than a trickle, not like the other men his age.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Oh, hon, nobody knows for sure how all this is supposed to work—it’s not like there’s a lot of medical history on our people! Some of our older men are as regular as, well, it just comes flowing out of them. But your dad, he was like a rusty faucet. Dribs and drabs.”

“Until yesterday.”

She patted his arm. “That’s right. Isn’t that something?”

He smiled, feeling nervous. “Those vials you took from my father. Where’d Everett take them?”

“Why, down to the freezer,” she said, as if that were obvious.

Pax rubbed at the back of his neck. “Okay, and then what?”

Rhonda didn’t answer. She waited until the air had washed over them again and they were out into the lobby, and then she said, “Everett told me he found you laying in the grass at your father’s, waving your arms.”

Paxton felt his face heat. “All I did was get some on me. That stuff hit me like a Mack truck.”

Rhonda shook her head. “I’m sorry about that, Paxton. Nobody ever thought it would have that kind of effect on you. Even so, I would have warned you if I thought your father was producing even a little bit.” The guard, Barron, glanced in their direction, then looked away. The old charlie man on the couch snored heavily. “But in a way it’s a good thing it happened.” She gestured toward a door marked OFFICE. “Sit down, let me tell you a story.”

Rhonda situated herself behind a big desk piled with paper, a PC on the oak return behind her. Her seat was raised; she was as tall sitting as standing. Pax took one of the leather guest chairs.

“Willie Flint was the first,” Rhonda said. “He started producing a couple years after you left. His son, Donald—he was a bit older than you?—he turned charlie too.” Pax remembered Donny Flint. Dumb as a box of rocks. “Well, Donald found out what it could do. It didn’t take long for the vintage parties to start. He started selling the stuff to other charlies. Boys were using too much, girls were going crazy, boys and girls alike were starting fights. A couple kids ended up in the hospital. Donald had it too strong, and it was going to kill someone.”

Pax nodded, even though he didn’t understand most of what she was talking about. Going crazy how?

“Well,” Rhonda said. “Nobody knew at first what this stuff was, or how he was getting it. They thought he was cooking it up at home, like that crystal meth? But Donald, he couldn’t stop himself from talking about it. Word got around. The next thing we knew, Donald’s disappeared, probably killed, and his so-called friends have decided to set up business for themselves.”

“What do you mean—they started selling it?”

“Not just selling it. They were doing their own extractions. I wasn’t mayor then, but I was with the group that found old Willie.” Her voice had grown hard. “They’d made him a prisoner in his own house. They’d barely been feeding him, poking at him with the same needle over and over. His skin was all infected …” She took a breath. “He was already dead when we found him, Paxton. They’d killed him. You wouldn’t of treated a dog like that.”

Rhonda opened a file drawer in the desk, drew out a manila folder. “A couple weeks later one of our other men started blistering, then another. I knew if we didn’t do something, it was going to happen all over again. Some stupid charlie boy with more muscles than sense would grab the next one, and the next one.

“You’re involved now, Paxton. Your father’s producing, so you should know what we’re doing with the vintage. First and foremost, we’re keeping it away from people who would abuse it. If we have it locked up here, then it’s not on the streets.”

“Then why not just destroy it?”

“Paxton, you don’t understand how much the young charlies want the vintage. If we cut off the supply completely, they’d just get desperate, and desperate people do stupid, dangerous things. Better to let it out in dribs and drabs, to the people I trust. Then they’re invested in keeping the system going.”

“You’re making a deal with the devil,” Pax said. “You can’t wave this in front of them and not expect them to come take it.”

“Don’t you worry about that. No place is safer than the Home.” She opened the folder and slid it across the desk to him. There looked to be more than fifty pages of forms tagged with yellow SIGN HERE stickies. “This is everything we need to enroll your father in the program and start treating him. HIPAA forms, requests for records—”

“Wait,” he said. “You said, ‘First and Foremost.’ What else—”

She waved a hand. “This packet here, these are the Medicaid forms and paperwork you’d have to sign for any extended care facility.”

“What else are you doing with the vintage, Rhonda?”

Rhonda sat back in her chair. She sighed. “I’d like to tell you. I would. But at this point it’s too early to get people’s hopes up.”

Pax let go of the pages and put his hands on his lap. “Forget it, then. I’m not signing.”

“Now, Paxton, don’t be difficult.”

He stood. “I’m sorry, Aunt Rhonda. Now if you could tell Everett to drive me home…”

He stood holding the doorknob. She pinned him with a steady look, then seemed to come to a decision. “Okay, then.” She nodded at the chair, then waited until he’d resumed his seat. “This has to remain strictly confidential, you understand? It cannot leave this room.”

“It depends on what you tell me. If it’s illegal—”

“No, it’s not illegal! Paxton Martin …” She shook her head in exasperation. “This is about the men of my clade. I am not content to condemn every charlie boy to what’s happened to your father, or God help me die locked up in some shack like Willie Flint. I am determined to end this.”

“End this? How? You’re not talking about euthanizing them, or—”

“Paxton, if you keep saying stupid things I will reach across the desk and slap you.”

“I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about research, Paxton. Scientific research. Getting the medical community to pay a little attention to the problems of this clade before another generation of men have to suffer. Every two weeks I send another shipment to Stanford University in California. There’s a man there with a team of eight graduate students working on figuring out what the vintage is, what it does, and how we can turn it off.”

“Why in the world would you keep that secret?”

“You’re not from here anymore, Paxton. And you’re not a charlie or you wouldn’t ask that question. Do you think Clete or Travis or any of the young charlies want to give up the vintage? Do you think they want this to be cut off forever? Before you open your mouth, the answer is no, they would not.”

She patted the stack of papers. “Now. I know this looks like a lot of papers, but they’re already filled out except for the dates and signatures, and I can walk you through them so you understand everything that you’re signing. After you do that, we can start taking care of your father. Today.”

“I don’t know,” Pax said.

She looked at him. “Talk to me, hon.”

“It’s just …” The top page in the stack was some kind of confidentiality form, with his own name typed at the bottom. He was almost embarrassed at how relieved he felt. Each of the forms—fifty, sixty of them, it didn’t matter—was like a rung on a ladder that would let him climb out of this pit. What else could he do, quit his job and move down here? Siphon the old man every day himself? He couldn’t do that. He wasn’t strong enough for that kind of work.

“I need to talk to my father,” he said. It didn’t sound convincing, even to himself. He’d already decided he would sign. All he needed was some time to explain to himself how this wasn’t a betrayal.

“I know you feel that way. But remember, Paxton, your daddy’s not in his right mind just now. The reverend’s been my friend for thirty years, but charlie men can’t function like they used to, not when the vintage is running in them. Whether you like it or not, you’re his guardian now.”

“I understand that,” he said. “I do.” He closed the folder and pulled it onto his lap. “Let me just take this home, look it over, and I’ll sign it tonight.”

“Tonight,” Rhonda said. She got up from her chair and came around the desk, opened her arms. “Don’t look so worried, honey. You’re doing the right thing. Now give Aunt Rhonda a hug.”

His father was still sleeping when Rhonda and Everett dropped him off at the house. Pax stood beside the couch for a long time, watching Harlan’s huge chest rise and fall, jowls shuddering with each snore.

Just below his father’s collarbone a patch of skin glistened in the lamplight. A small white blister, too small for the earlier siphoning, had split.

It would be a simple thing, Pax thought. Just dip a fingertip in the wet from the blister. He wouldn’t even have to wake the old man.

Paxton turned out the lamp. He made his way through the dark to the guest bedroom, put Rhonda’s folder under the bed, and lay down. His father snored like a misfiring engine. In the dark, with the door open between them, it sounded as if Harlan were lying beside him.